The Iraq war was always about oil. The ISIS extremists who are trying to seize control of the country’s largest refinery know that. Everyone was braced for the battle for Baghdad. But first they went after the oil. Just like the Americans.
In 2003, when Baghdad was a chaos of looting, the one thing the Americans secured was the Oil Ministry. Because oil is power.
If all you’ve got is a cave on a mountain side somewhere in Afghanistan, you have to do something really big to … [Read more...]

Everything they told you about Syria was wrong. The story where the noble, brave resistance were fighting to liberate their country. The story where Assad was the one the world had to worry about. Well, those resistance fighters have shown their faces now. And they are the butchers of ISIS, beheading their way through Iraq towards Baghdad.
Syria and Iraq are the same war. They have been for a long time. ISIS is fighting in both countries, it wants to establish a single Taliban-style state … [Read more...]

NEW EDITION OUT NOW
"This tense, thought-provoking and extraordinary book is an absolute must"
Daily Mail
The new edition of The Burden of the Desert, published by Short Books, is available now in all good bookshops
Zoe Temple, a young British journalist who dreams of being a war correspondent... Lieutenant Rick Benes, an American officer trying to get his platoon home alive... Adel, an Iraqi, who wants revenge for the death of his father... Mahmoud, an Iraqi … [Read more...]

There are times in life when you feel you must have been born in the wrong place. It's happening to me this week in London. All around me people are shaking their heads and sighing, declaring that it's "sweltering", "baking", "too hot to breathe", that they are "dying from the heat", that they can't sleep at night. The government has issued a Level Three Heatwave Alert. MPs are calling for people to be given time off work because of the devastating heat. And the temperature? A mild and pleasant … [Read more...]

At the end of the week that the world marked the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, it's worth pausing to remember the quiet heroes of the occupation.
I wish I had got to know Marla Ruzicka. I used to see her in the Al-Hamra Hotel in Baghdad, organising some party or other, charming everyone she met, setting a table of journalists laughing by the pool. She would smile as she passed -- she had a smile for everyone, even a bad-tempered correspondent like me, fighting with his editor … [Read more...]

If you want to know why the American occupation of Iraq was such a disaster, you need look no further than the story of the former Saddam Hussein Central Children's Hospital in Baghdad.
When I first saw the hospital in 2004, it was beyond belief. There was sewage dripping from the roof of the premature babies' ward, leaking from pipes above, spattering down to the floor between the cots, where it gathered in foul stinking puddles.
Downstairs in the leukaemia ward, the toilets had … [Read more...]

I spent Valentine's Day in Fallujah once -- an indication, perhaps, of how unhealthy my lifestyle had become. It was 2004, I was working as a journalist, covering the US-led occupation of Iraq, and it was beginning to go badly wrong. I was at the hotel in Baghdad when the news came through that heavily armed insurgents had stormed the police station and the new Iraqi army barracks in Fallujah, freeing prisoners and killing 17 police officers. The first thing I wanted to do was go … [Read more...]

Watching the gun control debate in the United States from afar, I was stuck by an odd dissonance. Something about the rhetoric of the pro-gun lobby didn't quite fit with my own experience. It took me a while to realise what it was. And then I remembered, it went back to Baghdad, when I was there as a journalist in the long hot summer of 2003, as the US occupation began to go wrong, and the situations started to spin out of control.
Facing increasing attacks from Iraqi insurgents, US forces … [Read more...]

The proofs for the cover of my first novel, Burden of the Desert, arrived this week. It was a strange experience to see them -- exciting, certainly, but humbling too, to think that this story I have carried in my head for so long will soon be a book. Looking at them, I thought of that night long ago when the idea for the novel first came to me in a hotel room in occupied Baghdad.
It was 2004 and I could hear the sounds of the city outside my window, the traffic, the constant gunfire, the … [Read more...]